Youth and the Bright Medusa eBook

“Mais, non!” M. Jules handed her
her muff with a quick, sympathetic glance. He
followed her out through the carpeted show-room, now
closed to the public and draped in cheesecloth, and
put her into her car with words appreciative of the
honour she had done him in calling.

Leaning back in the cushions, Eden Bower closed her
eyes, and her face, as the street lamps flashed their
ugly orange light upon it, became hard and settled,
like a plaster cast; so a sail, that has been filled
by a strong breeze, behaves when the wind suddenly
dies. Tomorrow night the wind would blow again,
and this mask would be the golden face of Aphrodite.
But a “big” career takes its toll, even
with the best of luck.

The Diamond Mine

I

I first became aware that Cressida Garnet was on board
when I saw young men with cameras going up to the
boat deck. In that exposed spot she was good-naturedly
posing for them—­amid fluttering lavender
scarfs—­wearing a most unseaworthy hat,
her broad, vigorous face wreathed in smiles. She
was too much an American not to believe in publicity.
All advertising was good. If it was good for
breakfast foods, it was good for prime donna,—­especially
for a prima donna who would never be any younger and
who had just announced her intention of marrying a
fourth time.

Only a few days before, when I was lunching with some
friends at Sherry’s, I had seen Jerome Brown
come in with several younger men, looking so pleased
and prosperous that I exclaimed upon it.

“His affairs,” some one explained, “are
looking up. He’s going to marry Cressida
Garnet. Nobody believed it at first, but since
she confirms it he’s getting all sorts of credit.
That woman’s a diamond mine.”

If there was ever a man who needed a diamond mine
at hand, immediately convenient, it was Jerome Brown.
But as an old friend of Cressida Garnet, I was sorry
to hear that mining operations were to be begun again.

I had been away from New York and had not seen Cressida
for a year; now I paused on the gangplank to note
how very like herself she still was, and with what
undiminished zeal she went about even the most trifling
things that pertained to her profession. From
that distance I could recognize her “carrying”
smile, and even what, in Columbus, we used to call
“the Garnet look.”

At the foot of the stairway leading up to the boat
deck stood two of the factors in Cressida’s
destiny. One of them was her sister, Miss Julia;
a woman of fifty with a relaxed, mournful face, an
ageing skin that browned slowly, like meerchaum, and
the unmistakable “look” by which one knew
a Garnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her,
smoking a cigarette while he ran over the passenger
list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youth
in a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French
bull-dog on the leash. This was “Horace,”